By now, Ricky Ian Gordon is, like, the WONDERLUST Poet Laureate…
Here are his most recent poems for us “Keys”, “Antonioni”, and “The Sand Hill Cranes”.
This one is a homage to the immortal French director Robert Bresson.
Bresson
(With thanks to Albert Camus)
A pair of shoes.
The brisk ascent
Up the stairs
Of a hurried shuffle,
And clip clop.
The terrace doors
Wide open,
Still swing.
The shoes
Rush outside.
A silk scarf
Floats indifferently
On a breeze,
While below,
Face down,
On the sidewalk,
Blood seeps
From the head
Of an unidentified woman.
Hushed onlookers
Stare.
*
Elsewhere,
On a crowded train
A fleet hand
Enters the pocket
Of a stranger
Removing its contents.
*
A crisp bill, counterfeit,
Enters the hands,
Of a student with debt,
Causing catastrophe.
*
An outcast girl,
As if playing,
Deliberately rolls herself
Down a hillside,
Splashes into a river,
And drowns.
*
A prisoner
Scratches himself
Out of a jail-cell
With the stem
Of a broken spoon,
And shimmies
Down the wall
With sheets
He has braided.
*
A country priest,
Blighted by
Stomach cancer,
Sustains himself
On bread
And water,
Preaching
Into the darkness.
*
A Knight’s armor
Rattles.
*
Joan’s pyre
Still smokes.
*
The Bateau Mouche
Lights the Seine
Like a behemoth.
*
A man, but barely,
Unable to make peace
With the felled trees,
The flock in the abattoir,
The battered baby seal,
The festering air,
Or the poisoned water,
Pays a friend
Needing money
For drugs,
To shoot him
In a cemetery.
*
While a donkey,
An ass
On a flowering hilltop,
Surrounded by sheep,
Brays,
Then collapses
From abuse
And exhaustion
In a grotesque parody
Of the crucifixion.